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“... she almost certainly did not say it anyway. For the ‘quote’ is preserved only in the work of Plutarch, who was writing early in the second century AD – and who may have been, unconsciously perhaps, reworking the marriage of these earlier Republican heroes (and giving them the appropriate lines) to fit with new notions of the marriage ...”

“... is at an end). The generation of the American Revolution steeped itself in the golden age of Plutarch and Cicero, and borrowed freely from Roman history to vaunt its own republican experiment. Although such thinking declined over the 19th century, yet the idea of Roman history as an instructive narrative of republican ascendancy and imperial corruption ...”

“... but conscious acts of homage.) Drouais’ Marius at Minturnae (1786) is based on the scene in Plutarch, in which a young Barbarian soldier is sent to murder the exiled Marius but is so terrified by the ‘strong flame’ from the old man’s eyes that he has to shield his face and flee from the room. It is the confrontation in David’s Belisarius in ...”

“... a rumour but a prearranged signal. These distinctions may be too fine for Neubauer. He begins with Plutarch’s cautionary account of the fate which befell the barber of Piraeus who, learning from one of his seafaring customers that the Greek fleet had been destroyed in Sicily, rushed to inform the citizens of Athens and was racked for propagating demoralising ...”

“... exists only in his actions, and mainly in his calendrical reforms. Even Mark Antony, who thanks to Plutarch is one of the most compelling figures in ancient history, gets only a couple of scattered sentences. We can guess at quite a lot more about the motives, anxieties and tics of Pompey, Caesar or Mark Antony than most premodern figures, but Beard grants ...”

“... letters’ (‘etenim scalpturae illae effigiesque quas videmus aegyptiae sunt litterae’). Plutarch even mentions that there were 25 Egyptian letters. But these hints at the truth, if such they were, were lost amid the general assumption of mystical esoteric symbolism.In 1419, for instance, an agent of the Medici bought an ancient manuscript by one ...”

“... past, either a personal past or that of the wider Hellenic world. One of his frequent sources is Plutarch; he also draws on Shakespeare and was fascinated by Julian the Apostate. Alexandria haunts his poetry, from the beginning to the end of his career. Among his earliest works is ‘The City’, a dialogue between two friends, the first of whom (perhaps a ...”

“... in antiquity and in Renaissance Europe; Shakespeare, adapting Thomas North’s translation of Plutarch, describes Cleopatra as ‘O’erpicturing that Venus where we see/The fancy out-work nature’. The classical genre terms ‘tragedy’, ‘comedy’ and ‘pastoral’ were employed and analysed in the Renaissance; Shakespeare takes a dig at learned ...”

“... knowledge, the more tardy must sweat for it. Shakespeare acquired more essential history from Plutarch than most could get from the whole British Museum.’ Before going further, however, the reader is entitled to some explanatory remarks on what is contained in this edition of Apocalypse; and a few remarks also on the Revelation itself – a document ...”

“... his surviving books more thoroughly than most of her predecessors. The explorer’s annotations of Plutarch, for instance, are treated with care and sensitivity instead of the contempt with which these instructive scribblings are usually dismissed. Here is the evidence for Columbus’s views on homosexuality, portents, fatherhood and self-indulgence. As well ...”

“... and unexpected guises that might not be familiar to modern sociobiologists. In a neglected work of Plutarch, for instance, we find Gryllus the pig, a victim of Circe’s magic, refusing to be turned back into a man and reasoning against Odysseus for the moral superiority of unreasoning beasts. In a novel of Achilles Tatius, the hero Cleitophon demonstrates the ...”

“... is the richest chapter in this book, in part because the extant sources are far more extensive. Plutarch, a native of Chaeronea in Boeotia, took a strong interest in his region’s heroes, though he wrote more than five centuries after their time. He probably gave his biography of Epaminondas pride of place as the opening chapter of Parallel Lives; it was ...”

“... on Julian, or else the likes of Arrian of the second century CE on Alexander of Macedonia, and Plutarch on still earlier Greeks: both smart analysts, as they would be called these days, with no reason to mislead us, yet forced to invent or credit any prior account that fitted their narrative needs simply because they were writing several centuries ...”

“... Shakespeare makes his mother, Volumnia, a much more formidable and important figure than she is in Plutarch. ‘She is a far subtler portrait than Lady Macbeth, of a woman who has absorbed the dominant values of her culture, and upholds them fiercely.’ Not more subtle, for Macbeth is not about culture values. But Coriolanus certainly is. As Dr French ...”

“... the Aeneid in the storm scene in Book IV. They may even have realised how often Rabelais draws on Plutarch, notably The Decline of Oracles. But few of us will have realised that the famous episode of the ‘thawing words’ (Fourth Book, Chapters 55-6) is not just a parodied traveller’s tale, Munchhausen-style, but also a reference to a Classical debate on ...”